In the digital age, it is becoming absolutely necessary to create an easy-to-use and effective online journey for your customers. Measurements and analytics will help you refine and enhance this journey, but you need statistics that will give you the most accurate information possible.
To really get the most out of your entire website performance, you need measurements that will tell you exactly how visitors are interacting with your online content. Two statistics that are helpful in measuring this activity are macro conversions and micro conversions:

Macro conversions – The big transactions in the customer’s online journey. Examples would be orders on an ecommerce site, RSS subscribers, or lead captures on contact forms. These are measurements of the ultimate goal and purpose of your website.

Micro conversions – These are all of the smaller interactions that hopefully lead to macro conversions. Examples are page views of a blog post, a visitor bookmarking a page on your website, a fan following a link on one of your Facebook posts, or the number of times your online brochure was printed.

Measuring both macro conversions and micro conversions will give you the complete picture of how consumers interact with your online marketing activities.

It may be helpful to think of micro conversions as dating. If the interaction between your online brand and your customers is a relationship, then it is very unlikely that a customer will agree to marry you right away (a macro conversion). It is much more likely that they will “date” you, or visit you from time to time and try to learn a little more about you each time. They might see a tweet you post, watch one of your YouTube videos, or read your “About Us” page to determine if they would like to do business with you. Hopefully, all of these interactions are positive and lead to a macro conversion, but the main takeaway is that these “dates” usually are spread out across multiple visits. If you are just tracking how a user interacts with your website during one visit, you are not getting a complete picture.

Let’s take a step back for one second. Let’s say you are paying attention to the number of page visits or page views to your website on a daily basis. This is certainly relevant information, but it tells you very little about how your customers feel about you before or after they leave your website. The next step further would be to track how often a contact form submission leads to a sale. This information is important because it tells you well your website converts visitors and is optimized. To be an internet marketing pro however, you need to know how people got to your contact form. Where did they come from? Why did they contact you? What motivated them to contact you? These are all very important questions that micro conversions can help you answer. For example:

You might be wondering, “How do I track these micro conversions, then?” Well, it is actually not all that difficult, but it does take some time to learn some basic coding tactics. This is actually one of the lessons you will learn in our Digital Analytics Certification Course, a workshop series that will help you become a PRO in tracking. Micro conversions are an important aspect of this course and it’s easy to understand why. If you think about all of those details that go into SEO and raising your Google rankings, it can be very daunting. Micro conversions will help you cut out the extraneous aspects of these activities and let you focus on the ones that work. By using micro conversions, you can identify what blog posts, tweets, or Facebook posts are working and which ones aren’t. You can then use this information to create targeted posts that capture the interest of the most users. If all of your posts are bull’s-eyes, you have a distinct competitive advantage over the competition. That’s the power of micro conversions.

*Revenue per 1000 impressions (RPM) represents the estimated earnings you’d accrue for every 1000 impressions you receive. RPM doesn’t represent how much you have actually earned; rather, it’s calculated by dividing your estimated earnings by the number of page views, impressions, or queries you received, then multiplying by 1000.

Formula: RPM = (Estimated earnings / Number of page views) * 1000

If you earned an estimated $0.15 from 25 page views, then your page RPM would equal ($0.15 / 25) * 1000, or $6.00.

2 Comments

Valerie Coolidge Says

Zed Digital Says

12 November 2014

Valerie,

The Google Analytics Course is valuable for anyone with a website, not just Ecommerce websites. The skills taught in this course will allow you to track incoming web traffic from all web sources with pinpoint precision. This will help you allocate resources to online activities that are helping your business and cut ties with ones that aren’t having a significant impact.